Fall of Nineveh

In the summer of 612 BC a coalition of Babylonians and Medes besieged and sacked Nineveh, the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, on the Tigris opposite modern Mosul. The Assyrian king Sinsharishkun died in the fighting. Within a few years the empire that had dominated the Near East for centuries was gone, and Babylon, rather than an Assyrian city, became the centre of Mesopotamian power.

At its height under Ashurbanipal, Assyria ruled or took tribute from lands stretching from the Caucasus to Egypt and from western Iran to the Mediterranean coast. Its own records portray a harsh style of rule, and it had worn itself out fighting in Egypt, against Elam and against rebellions in Babylonia. After Ashurbanipal died in 631 BC, bitter succession struggles broke out inside Assyria itself, and from about 625 BC its grip on its subject peoples began to slip.

In southern Mesopotamia, Nabopolassar built a new Babylonian kingdom whose aim was to overthrow Assyria and move the seat of power to Babylon. A Babylonian tablet now known as the Fall of Nineveh Chronicle describes years of fighting. In 616 BC, Nabopolassar's tenth year, his army marched along the Euphrates and defeated the Assyrians. The next year an attack on Assur failed, and the Assyrians chased the Babylonians back to the fortress of Takritain on the Tigris, but after ten days of fighting they were beaten and went home.

The Babylonians then found allies in the Medes, ruled by Cyaxares, and in the Scythians. In 614 BC the Medes captured and sacked the ancient city of Assur before the Babylonian army could arrive, and Nabopolassar and Cyaxares sealed their alliance beside its ruins.

In 612 BC the Babylonian and Median armies joined forces and camped before Nineveh. They began the siege in late spring and, after about three months, broke through the defences in August. The city was plundered and burned, and the fighting and looting went on until about 10 August, when the attackers withdrew. Modern accounts give the Medes the leading part in the capture. Sinsharishkun was killed, but his brother Ashur-uballit II fought his way out and set up a last Assyrian capital at Harran.

A much later Greek account, by Ctesias as preserved in Diodorus, claims that a flood of the river helped to bring down the walls. Some scholars think the attackers may have diverted the Khosr, a tributary of the Tigris, to breach them. The palace was burned, which may have helped preserve some of the clay tablets in its library.

Almost every surviving account was written by Assyria's enemies: the Babylonian chronicle itself, the Hebrew Book of Nahum, later Greek writers such as Herodotus and Ctesias, and Egyptian records. Assyria's own chronicles break off decades earlier, so much of the city's last years remains obscure. A confused memory of the fall later grew into the Greek legend of the decadent king Sardanapalus.

The war did not end at Nineveh. Ashur-uballit fought on with Egyptian support, but Harran fell in 609 BC, which is usually taken as the end of the Assyrian Empire, and an Egyptian and Assyrian army was defeated at Carchemish in 605 BC. What happened to Ashur-uballit is unknown. Archaeology shows that Nineveh shrank and lost much of its population in the following centuries, while Babylon became an imperial capital for the first time in more than a millennium.

Our 700 BC map shows Assyria near its height, before the fall, and the 500 BC map shows the region after it had passed to Babylon and then to the Achaemenid Empire. The city's site lies in today's Iraq.